How do I recode character variable?

Question

I am a beginner in R so this is a very basic question. I do not find a specific answer to it so I would like to ask you here.

I'm confronted with the following challenge; I'd like to recode a character variable and create one out of this.

Specifically, the variable in my data frame(data) is called "driver", with the categories "market", "legislation", "technology", and "mixed".

Now I would simply like to create a new variable, "driverrec", with the values "market" and "others". In "others" the three remaining variables shall be summarized.

I tried it with this page: http://rprogramming.net/recode-data-in-r/

Basically, I tried the following code to adopt on mine, but it won't work for more than one category.

#Create a new field called NewGrade
SchoolData$NewGrade <- recode(SchoolData$Grade,"5='Elementary'")

# my attempt
driverrec <- data$driver
recode(driverrec, "'Mixed'='others'") This is working.

But the whole recode is not working:

recode(driverrec, "'Mixed'='others'", "'Technology'='others'", 
"'Legislation'='others'", "'Market'='market'" ) 

I am looking forward to and thank you for your help.

Answer 1

I found a solution not using the replace command:

data$driverrec[dataframe$driver=='Market'] <- 'market' data$driverrec[is.na(dataframe$driver)==TRUE] <- 'others'

This worked fine; in order, someone is looking for a solution ;)!